Igon Value

Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

It turns out from LL’s investigations that, when the piece in question was originally printed in the New Yorker, that magazine’s legendary editors corrected Gladwell’s booboo to read “eigenvalue”; yet it has reverted to the nonsense “igon value” in his new collection of “essays”.

A mystery nonetheless remains: what on earth did Gladwell intuit that an igon value had to be, such that he didn’t bother to check? A number that has disappeared? (Middle English i-gon: past participle of i-go, meaning, um, go.) A technique named after a Basque mathematician called Igon? Or perhaps he thought an Igon Value was a moral standard among members of the Igon commune in Pyrénées-Atlantiques?

I have never read a whole book by Malcolm Gladwell. Have you, readers?

40 comments

I’ve been reading through some of the archive of his New Yorker articles on his website which have some interesting things in them although I wonder if my reaction to them is a bit like my reaction to Julie Burchill, that he writes about so many different things so much that he can’t fail to chime with what I’m interested in once in a while. It helps that I’m choosing the articles that sound interesting to me and that they tend to involve him writing briefly about what other people have already written. What they don’t do, at all, is make me want to read one of his books.

(I must say, I loved his recent article in the New Yorker about David and Goliath, and how the little guy can beat the big guy: he based it on an array of exquisitely erudite-cum-envelope-pushingly-diverse examples derived from basketball, history and political science; shortly afterwards, the New Yorker published three letters written by people with a great deal of specialised knowledge in precisely those areas of basketball, history, and political science Gladwell had cited, each one showing how he got it wrong. I actually thought that he would be fired – but, heck, it’s probably just another chapter in his next book. Pebble? Slingshot? Just Sling?)

I’ve always thought that, in honour of the blog mentioned above, any particularly awkward or unclear piece of writing should be referred to as a “language log.” As in “Dan Brown sat down at his writing desk and squeezed out another language log.”

I vaguely recall enjoying the Tipping Point, but being disappointed by Blink and Outliers with their statements of the obvious and unconvincing misuse of correlation. Outliers had some particularly dodgy theories on ethnicity.

I do like the range of anecdotes in Gladwell’s books. That ketchup-mustard New Yorker essay was pretty cool too. There’s something strangely compulsive about his writing.

I’m sure this all makes me a total lowbrow. I guess Gladwell is the Dan Brown of the social sciences.

[P]erhaps Gladwell’s intellectual compromises are neither commercial nor unintentional but rather a necessary outgrowth of his higher calling: to explore the secret workings of the world and impart the resulting data to its self-appointed stewards, the titans of industry

I’ve also read all of Gladwell’s books, and probably most of his New Yorker articles as well. Then again I also like Philip Glass and Ian McEwan and all sorts of other upper-middlebrow things. If I had to half-heartedly defend the Igon Value thing, it would go something like: wasn’t his father a mathematician or something? When I was a kid I thought my dad was going around saying “bowl shit” (obviously he wasn’t a mathematician) and it wasn’t until much later that I realized “bullshit” made a lot more sense.

Tawfiq, despite piling onto Gladwell above, I must say no! Gladwell has his flaws (who doesn’t?) but he is also witty; his writing is fascistically readable; his curiosity may be a bit cloying with portentious, wide-eyed wowzeeness, but he nevertheless bothers to look around in wonderment; and, for all the succinct cutesiness of some of his conclusions, he is fundamentally off-kilter enough to be interesting even if he is sometimes disappointing and underwhelming – but hey, who isn’t? I’m not sure these qualities can be ascribed to de Botton.

An, in reply to your second question, may I offer: A Guy-Girl Counter? Boil’s law? Sapper Wharf Hypothesis?

In my childhood, whenever adults would say “I see” (as in “I understand”) I would mentally picture “I C” (this was decades before “RU n 2nite?” textspeak). I still do this automatically, even when I say “I see” in conversation.

Of course, it’s “embarrassing” for Gladwell, but if I were Pinker I wouldn’t make too much of that kind of slip. He’s not above making “embarrassing” slips himself when he writes on topics about which he seems, to put it politely, relatively uninformed. (Eg see the chapter on “Mentalese” in The Language Instinct, and the peculiar blanket generalisations about “psychologists”, “sociologists”, “modernists” and “postmodernists” in The Blank Slate).

Mocking the greatest intellectual in the universe may not be a good idea. To your eternal credit, Alastair Campbell and Alain De Botton (second greatest intellectual in the universe) already hate your guts. Do you really want to add Malcolm Gladwell to the list?

High Zen Burg Insert Auntie Principal. (Phenomenon whereby visitors to cities located at considerable elevation and featuring a large number of Buddhist houses of worship become determined to encourage their mother’s sister to emigrate to said settlement as a way of ameliorating the stress that she experiences owing to her job as the headmistress of an American high school.)

Just for the record, Gladwell appeared with Stephen Colbert this week to talk about his new book What the Dog Saw. I haven’t really watched it yet. I have to admit I really did enjoy his TED Talk (about spaghetti sauce, or ketchup, or something).